Blotter | March 30, 2017

Blotter is your twice-weekly rundown on all things true crime happening in the world of movies, TV, podcasts, and beyond.

I’ve got a lot of links and otherwise clicky-type suggestions to take you into the weekend. Happy reading, watching and listening:

First up, I mentioned this one earlier in the week as the kind of justice-system-gone-wrong story so many true crime fans have become familiar with—though what makes this one special is its twist. In 1978 Kerry Max Cook was convicted of one of Tyler, Texas’s most disturbing homicides. He worked to clear his name for decades, but once he finally did, he asked the court to convict him again. Here’s the story from Texas Monthly.

In TV land, we got a trailer this week for the upcoming Univision-Netflix co-production, El Chapo. Univison gets it first; it’s premiering in mid-April there before moving to Netlflix a bit later. Apparently, it’s getting a lot of comparison to Narcos, which I’ve never seen because I doubt it could be better than a Don Winslow novel.

Podcast news? Yep, I’ve got some. Have you been listening to S-Town? I’m only on the third episode and having a somewhat fraught relationship with it. But, man, if it doesn’t keep pulling me back in. If you’d like a look at John B.’s hedge maze, some resourceful internet types have found it. (Caution: May contain spoilers depending on how many episodes deep you are)

Lastly on the audio front, it looks like one of my favorite understated crime podcasts, Generation Why, tackled the Keddie Murders a few months ago. I’d never heard of the still-unsolved case until this week, but it’s a shocker involving a family and a cabin—Number 28—in the woods.

Finally, it’s kind of crazy how often the worlds of real estate and unrelenting horror co-mingle if you think about it. Sometimes that horror is even man-made, as the family who bought the infamous New Jersey “Watcher House” for $1.3 million just shy of three years ago has discovered. Since they moved in, they claim they’ve been receiving threatening notes from someone who bills himself as The Watcher. Normal stuff like “Have they found what is in the walls yet? In time, they will.” There have been some developments.